Well, I assume most people probably accept that some people are better than average at learning languages, while others are not as good. But the reasons for this aren’t quite clear. PNAS has a paper out on this topic, Brain potentials to native phoneme discrimination reveal the origin of individual differences in learning the sounds of a second language. I find the ScienceDaily summary comprehensible, and one of the researchers says:

“Therefore, these results show that there is a positive correlation between specific speech discrimination abilities and the ability to learn a second language, which means that the individual ability to distinguish the specific phonemes of the language, both in the case of the mother tongue and in the case of other languages, is, without a doubt, a decisive factor in the learning process, and the ability to speak and master other languages,” concludes Begona Diaz.

I recently attended a talk by Marshall Brain. He made the argument that the shift toward intelligent robots in the labor force will result in a much higher degree of structural unemployment in our economy. Brain presented some economic data which showed that gains in productivity over the past 10 years have not yield median wage gains or maintained a demand for labor. There were some details where I thought Brain undercut his plausibility (e.g., he didn’t seem to be using the most wildly accepted definition of a recession, instead simply focusing on the metric of full employment as the only worthwhile economic indicator). An irritated audience member asked him if he had heard about a discipline called history which suggests that these sorts of predictions never pan out.

Brain’s response was that the difference between labor saving technology in the past and the emergence of intelligent robots is that the latter are a new species. In other words, the demand for labor may increase with an expanding economy, but intelligent robots will have incredible comparative advantages compared to humans for the new occupational opportunities. Additionally, while technology expands and leverages human abilities, opening up opportunities, intelligent robots with agency would not need the complement of particular human cognitive skills.

The empirical argument is based on the peculiarities of the recent past, so the historical argument looking back to the “industrial revolution” and its effect on economic growth and long term demand for labor and the impact on wages is compelling. In Farewell to Alms Greg Clark points out that in fact since the Great Divergence the rise of the mass consumer society has been enabled by enormous comparative and absolute gains of wealth accrued toward unskilled labor. Only since 1970 has this dynamic been somewhat reversed. But I think that one point to remember is that the pattern of 1800-1970 itself is a relatively short time window. Obviously a future where intelligent robots substitute for human labor and management is not analogous to a pre-modern agrarian economy caught in the Malthusian trap, but I think it is important to remember that refuting Brain’s argument by an appeal to history itself relies on fixing a particular set of background conditions which themselves are relatively new.

All that being said, I can imagine intelligent robots replacing humans in a wide range of service, manufacturing and even professional jobs. Imagine for example a robot doctor who has immediate access to the total body of the latest research, but can intelligently weight these results appropriately so the swell of most recent likely false positives don’t hold so much sway. There would be no worries that a robot doctor would not be able to engage in Bayesian logic. But does that mean there won’t be roles for humans? Perhaps there are niches for human art and cultural production where robots might crave organic authenticity? After all, why couldn’t there be Bobo robots who are willing to shell out extra for human-made products which exhibit the imprecise, irrational and wild creativity characteristic of the organic substrate mind? Humans would have an enormous advantage over robots in Outsider Art. One could spin many scenarios of this sort, as Brain’s model seems to be predicated on the standard opposition between man and machine which goes back to the Luddites.

Finally, I wonder if a nation like Japan might not be well positioned if the rise of the machines does result in reduced demand for human labor. Japan’s native labor force is shrinking. This sort of thing is generally considered to be bad, but if robots entered the labor force and increased total productivity greatly then the problem of an imbalance between a large retired class and a smaller labor force goes away. The remaining younger humans in the labor force could focus on jobs where humans have a shot; e.g., instead of the Salaryman the Freeter might be the modal human Japanese.

Linux Is Making Me Insane: Grappling with Ubuntu, the free, open-source operating system. I have Ubuntu on my PC through a dual-boot. I also purchased a USB wireless card which was guaranteed to be compatible with Ubuntu plug-and-play. It does work…80% of the time. The problem is that it “drops” the connection every half hour or so and I might have to end up rebooting the system to get it to work again. No thanks. There are some programs which only run on Linux systems that I keep Ubuntu around for (VMware is way too slow), but for browsing the internet it is just not useful for me. If someone like me, or Thomas Mailund, is lukewarm to the most user-friendly of the Linux distributions, I’d say not ready for primetime as your grandma’s OS….

Obviously the most prominent Indian American politician today is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. But Jindal is not very representative of Indian Americans:

…Additionally, there are also industry-wide Indian American groupings including the Asian American Hotel Owners Association and the Association of American Physicians of Indian Origin. Despite being heavily religious and having the highest average household income among all ancestry groups in the United States, Indian Americans tend to be more liberal and tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Polls before the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election showed Indian Americans favoring Democratic candidate John Kerry favored over Republican George W. Bush by a 53% to 14% margin (nearly a 4 to 1 ratio), with 30% undecided at the time….

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Dienekes points to another paper on European population substructure, Genome-Wide Analysis of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms Uncovers Population Structure in Northern Europe:

In this study, we analysed almost 250,000 SNPs from a total of 945 samples from Eastern and Western Finland, Sweden, Northern Germany and Great Britain complemented with HapMap data. Small but statistically significant differences were observed between the European populations…The latter indicated the existence of a relatively strong autosomal substructure within the country, similar to that observed earlier with smaller numbers of markers. The Germans and British were less differentiated than the Swedes, Western Finns and especially the Eastern Finns who also showed other signs of genetic drift. This is likely caused by the later founding of the northern populations, together with subsequent founder and bottleneck effects, and a smaller population size. Furthermore, our data suggest a small eastern contribution among the Finns, consistent with the historical and linguistic background of the population.

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In the book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State (see Razib’s review here and the book’s blog here), the authors note that the two major political parties have become more polarized in various ways since the 1990s, even though the average voter hasn’t changed much. Also, the key message of the book is that the red state – blue state culture war is mostly restricted to high-income, and to a lesser extent middle-income voters.

They searched some mainstream media outlets for the words “polarizing / polarization,” as well as buzzwords for the cultural split like “NASCAR dad” and “soccer mom,” and found that they either show up for the first time or increase during the early/mid-1990s and remain as high today. I’ve searched the NYT for “partisan,” as well as a variety of newspapers for the pejorative “partisan hack,” and they show the same pattern.

Here are the graphs:

For the first graph, I took the number of articles with “partisan” and standardized this by dividing by the number of articles with “the” — basically, all articles. (The 2008 point is an estimate based on the year so far.) Aside from 1984, when there was a huge divide between the two presidential candidates, there is nearly no change from 1981 to 1991. However, in 1992, when the culture war begins to take center stage, the frequency increases to about twice as high as during the 1980s.

For the second graph, I did a Lexis-Nexis search for “partisan hack,” a common culture war swear-word for what the other guy is. I included the 12 newspapers with the highest counts, and that covered most of the major papers as well as some lesser known ones (see full list below). Not being able to search the database for “the,” I couldn’t standardize these data, but they show the same pattern as above, so I doubt the year-to-year variation in total output explains it. Here is the total output per year for the NYT, for comparison. Again, the 2008 point is for the year so far.

Aside from a few jabs from The Imblerian in the early 1990s, the first time this phrase shows up is in 1994, and it spreads to an order of magnitude larger by the 2000s. Outside of newspapers, Lexis-Nexis returns a result from 1984 where a politician is quoted as calling another a partisan hack. So the term must have been invented before the 1990s, but surged during the culture war.

These data agree with the larger picture in the book: the topic of partisanship has become much more talked about since the 1990s, and the specific slander “partisan hack” has increased noticeably during the same time.

List of newspapers included in the Lexis-Nexis results: New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Boston Globe, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Star-Ledger, Richmond Times, Palm Beach Post, St. Petersburg Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Oregonian.

John Wilkins points me to a piece by Pascal Boyer,* Being human: Religion: Bound to believe?:

So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts, rather than ‘religion’ in the modern form of socio-political institutions, contributed to fitness in ancestral times. For the time being, the data support a more modest conclusion: religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities.

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David’s penultimate post on Sewall Wright, Notes on Sewall Wright: The Shifting Balance Theory – Part 1:

Two catch-phrases indissolubly linked with Sewall Wright are the adaptive landscape, and the shifting balance. In preparing my note on Wright’s concept of the adaptive landscape I was surprised to discover that Wright himself seldom if ever used this expression. I could not find a single example. I was therefore half-expecting that I would not find any reference to the shifting balance either – and I would have been half-right. Wright did use that term, but not, as far as I can find, until surprisingly late in his long career….

Part 2 coming soon….
Related: Notes on Sewall Wright: the Adaptive Landscape, Notes on Sewall Wright: Migration, Notes on Sewall Wright: Population Size, Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of Kinship, Notes on Sewall Wright: Path Analysis and On Reading Wright.

As you can see to the left Gene Expression hasn’t raised that much money this year. That’s not so hot, but, some of the other ScienceBloggers have raised a bunch, so that’s heartening. I also wanted to add that Seed will be “padding” our contributions this year, but right now the amount that Seed is giving is multiples greater than what I’ve raised so far, so I hope readers can help me out a bit….

It’s a big blogosphere. Aziz points me Islam in China. They have an interesting post up which reiterates much of what I said about the diversity of Chinese Muslims, along with obscure facts such as that the second ranking Vice Premier of China is Hui. Not that there’s anything wrong it….